America's Shocking Nuclear Hypocrisy

By Tad Daley, AlterNet
Posted on November 9, 2007, Printed on November 9, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/67368/

Some call it "America's nuclear hypocrisy." Others call it the "nuclear double standard," others still our "nuclear narcissism." Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, echoing the phrase used by Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh at the time of his own country's nuclear tests in 1998, often calls it "nuclear apartheid." But it has rarely been expressed as baldly as it was during the last days of October 2007.

It started with two passings. Paul Tibbets, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces B-29, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, that killed at least 80,000 people, and Randall Forsberg, the genius behind the 1982 Central Park nuclear freeze rally, which the New York Times, in her obituary, called the largest political demonstration in American history, both died -- with exquisite irony -- within just a few days of each other.